David Breuer-Weil: Project 4 at the Vaults

Underneath the arches, burrowed underneath the tracks of London Waterloo, is The Vaults. With its compact, bunker-like corridor opening up into rooms with towering ceilings and grid metal platforms, you feel as if you are walking into the undercover brains of the station. A fascinating parallel can immediately be drawn with Project 4, the fourth exhibition of artist David Breuer-Weil.

With his aims being chiefly concerned with the individual understanding his own mortality and place in history within the contemporary world, Breuer-Weil’s work leads visitors around the expansive gallery space through a procession of painted and sculpted visions. Shadowed figures peer out from a mass of bubbles, they tumble out of broken worlds and pour into others, they march out of cardboard boxes and clamber up ladders out of great cracks in the ground. Three statue figures emerging in slow succession from a mildewed puddle at the centre of the room add up to Aspiration.

Deeply critical of many artists’ focus on the more material aspects of the contemporary world, Breuer-Weil depicts his semi-apocalyptic worlds through visual symbols. The experience of many of his paintings can be likened to awe of the Sublime – the sensation of being surrounded by the metaphysical power of one’s own existence. This is big stuff. However, Breuer-Weil’s world is not an angry one. The artist cleverly juxtaposes the weighty subjects of mortality and existence in a way that appears dreamlike but not nightmarish. His work does not attempt to confront or challenge the viewer; rather it inspires an awareness and acceptance of their place in a busy world.

Colour plays with light to radiate life into the hollow space of The Vaults. Paintings, statues and visitors emerge out of the shadows as you traverse the innards and cavernous depths of Waterloo. The steady rumble of trains above is a constant reflection of what the artist is writing about: what goes underneath, inside and around the formalities of the real world is the deep, contemplative psyche of David Breuer-Weil’s Project 4.

Rosie Hillsdon

David Breuer-Weil’s Project 4 is at The Vaults from 7^th February until 24^th March 2013. For further information visit the artist’s website here.